Now I know why I don't turn on the news in the evening. I should just stick to Tivo-ing FoodTV. Alton will never anger me, he just wants to teach me how to roast a beet or drain the alkaloids from an eggplant.

Honestly, how do professional politicians do what they do without killing each other? There must be either some skill, or some brain deficiency that exists that allows them to continue without going absolutely crazy at the sausage-making aspects of being a professional pol.

Oh, and if someone could manage to drop something extremely heavy on Larry King, I would greatly appreciate it. From about 30 or 40 feet ought to do it. Why does this idiot still have a primetime show? Could we just replace him with Charlie Rose, and be done with it?

| permalink (2005/03/22 21:12)

From my last post, it's clear that it's not too healthy to watch CNN for long periods of time. However, I've just found something worse: "Next time on Entertainment Tonight: Terri Schiavo. Murder, or Mercy? The stars weigh in! Then: Brad and Angelina's sexy new scenes!"

Somewhere, a latter-day Gibbon is writing all of this down...

/misc | permalink (2005/03/21 23:50)

On my flight to LAX, the greying man of about 55 or so sitting in the seat across from me was wearing the following items, roughly in this order.

• Purple sweatsuit
• iPod Shuffle
• Headphones, with adjustable headstrap
• Bad toupee

The strap for the headphones went under the toupee. He walked into the cabin with the jack in his hand. At the end of the flight, clearly unable to remove the headphones without removing the whole hairpiece, he unplugged the jack from his Shuffle, and walked out with it in his hand as well. We are all of us strange, sad little monkeys. When it comes my turn, I can only hope I can deal with age more gracefully.

Or, at the very least, more competently.

| permalink (2005/03/20 21:19)

Orrin Hatch is still in charge of writing copywright legislation in the Senate. I can't even hope for a Democratic takeover of the Senate to fix this problem, because Subcommandante Leahy is the ranking Dem on the sub-committee. Fan-freaking-tastic.

/politics | permalink (2005/03/18 10:28)

The incomprehensible little screenshot at the right is my first GJK implementation running in test mode. I'm actually kind of disappointed in how straightforward the algorithm is once you drill past some poor notation in the standard papers. I remember that I put off playing around with GJK a couple years ago because I had the impression that it was High Voodoo. Apparently, not so. Gino van den Bergen's paper is a comprehensive account of what you need to know to implement the core of the algorithm, especially when augmented by examination of FreeSOLID, but the notation makes me groan.

Once you get past that, the idea is really quite elegant and straightforward. I especially like the way the underlying representation of the hull is completely opaque to the inner loop. Quadrics, boxes, polymeshes, whatever. If it's convex, toss it in and it Just Works. Sweet. Want to sweep out linear motion? Twiddle the return value of one of the support points based on the dot product of the direction of motion and the support vector. Done.

The depressing part, of course with all object interference detection is the messy reality of implementing such a nice, clean, algorithm in dirty, nasty, single-precision floats. This stuff isn't currently very robustinated against precision problems, I'll eventually do that if I ever figure out what I'm going to use this for.

/projects | permalink (2005/03/18 01:14)